What’s at stake: “A people who mean to be their own Governors
must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” James Madison.

NOTE: FOR EIGHT NUMBERS
THIS NEWSLETTER ON WHISTLEBLOWERS WAS PUBLISHED PERIODICALLY. NOW IT IS PUBLISHED ON (AT PRESENT the PROPOSED) NATIONAL
WHISTLEBLOWER’S DAY, JULY 30. SEE
EXPLANATION BELOW.

OMNI’s endowed fund at
UA’s Mullins Library for the purchase of books and films on Victims includes
books and films on corporations and on resistance to US Imperialism Abroad and
Repression at Home—including whistleblowers and investigative reporters, true
heroes, true valor.

Greenwald on Maher, Who Elected
the Whistleblowers and Leakers?

Tomgram, Next Whistleblower Battle?

A profound message from Pentagon Papers
whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg is now on a billboard half a block from the
State Department:"Don't
wait until a new war has started, don't wait until thousands more have
died, before you tell the truthwith
documents that reveal lies or crimes…"

The billboard has caused quite a stir. But we’re just getting started.

As Ellsberg says on the billboard, a whistleblower"might save a war's
worth of lives."

One billboard has made a lot of impact. Ten would be ten times better.
Let's do it!

You can help make it happen now.

If you’ve already donated to RootsAction’s special Ellsberg billboard
fund, thank you! Since last week, we’ve raised a bit over half the money
necessary to put up more than ten new billboards in key Washington locations by early July.

With war drums now beating for the U.S.
to bomb Iraq,
a whistleblower could expose the fraudulence of the propaganda by
revealing internal documents -- as Ellsberg did.

In a country with a government addicted to militarism, mass surveillance
and secrecy, we don't fulfill our duties simply by voting, backing
candidates and attending protests.Another
task is to support whistleblowing by individuals who see wrongdoing
inside government or corporations.

That's why RootsAction is stepping up to support the cutting-edge work of
the new organization ExposeFacts.org for independent journalism and an
informed public.

RootsAction believes that a crucial antidote to official wrongdoing is
EXPOSURE -- combined with movement-building to demand change.Progress can't happen when
powerful institutions are allowed to operate in the dark.

That's why Daniel Ellsberg is so enthusiastic about this effort
spearheaded by ExposeFacts.org.

Our hope is that whistleblowing will spread from federal agencies to
local governments to corporationsthat
pollute or have unfair labor practices or produce unsafe products.

You may not work inside a government institution or a corporation
engaging in misconduct, but you may have a friend, relative or neighbor
who does. Besides billboarding, we need to spread this message person to
person.

Let the world know that ExposeFacts.org -- a new organization led by
respected independent journalists and brave whistleblowers -- is open for
truth-telling business.The
ExposeFacts motto:Whistleblowers Welcome Here.

Letter to an Unknown WhistleblowerHow the SecurityState’s
Mania for Secrecy Will Create You
ByTom Engelhardt

Dear Whistleblower,

I don’t know who you are or
what you do or how old you may be. I just know that you exist somewhere in
our future as surely as doestomorrowor
next year. You may be young and computer-savvy or a career federal employee
well along in years. You might be someone who entered government service
filled with idealism or who signed on to “the bureaucracy” just to make a
living. You may be a libertarian, a closet left-winger, or as mainstream and
down-the-center as it’s possible to be.

I don’t know much, but I
know one thing that you may not yet know yourself. I know that you’re there.
I know that, just as Edward Snowden and Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning did, you will, for reasons
of your own, feel compelled to take radical action, to put yourself in
danger. When the time comes, you will know that this is what you must do,
that this is why you find yourself where you are, and then you’re going to
tell us plenty that has been kept from us about how our government really operates.
You are going to shock us to the core.

And how exactly do I know
this? Because despite our striking inability to predict the future,
it’s a no-brainer that the national security state is already building you
into its labyrinthine systems. In the urge of its officials tocontrolall of us and every situation, in
their mania for all-encompassing secrecy, in their classification not just of
themillionsof documents they generate, but
essentially all their operations as “secret” or “top secret,” in their
all-encompassing urge to shut off the most essential workings of the
government from the eyes of its citizenry, in their escalating urge topunishanyone who would
bring their secret activities to light, in their urge to see or read or
listen in on or peer into the lives of you (every “you” on the planet), in
their urge to build aglobal surveillance stateand a military that will dominate
everything in or out of its path, in their urge to drop bombs on Pakistan and
fire missiles at Syria, in their urge to be able toassassinatejust about
anyone just about anywhere robotically, they are birthing you.

Chalmers Johnson, whotook“blowback,” an obscure term of CIA
tradecraft, and embedded it in our everyday language, would have instantly
recognized what they’re doing: creating a blowback machine whose “unintended
consequences” (another term of his) are guaranteed, like the effects of theSnowden revelations,
to stun us all in a myriad of ways. Click here to read more of this dispatch.

FOCUS | Obama Has Followed in
Nixon's FootstepsAdam Liptak, The New York TimesLiptak
writes: "The federal government is prosecuting leakers at a brisk clip and
on novel theories. It is collecting information from and about journalists,
calling one a criminal and threatening another with jail."READ MORE

RESTORE PROTECTIONS TO
WHISTLEBLOWER

Fear retaliation?

Rick, Public
Citizen

Dick,
Imagine what it must be like when a worker with access to inside information at
the NSA, FBI or CIA recognizes that the government is secretly violating the
rights of American citizens.

You believe what the intelligence agency has been doing is not only morally
wrong, but against the law. Do your colleagues agree? Does your boss?

Imagine the fear you must overcome to right such a wrong — especially when
you lack protection from retaliation if your boss disagrees. If your boss fires
you for speaking out, you can’t even take your boss to court.

KAREN MARTIN, WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS: FREE PRESS AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE, ARKANSAS
DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE (August 30, 2013). “This fast-paced,
expertly researched and well-edited documentary by Robert Greenwald [presents
a] picture of the Bush and Obama administrations’ aggressive pursuit of those
accused of violating secrecy and the resulting infringement of the freedom of
the press.” The film focuses on
whistleblowers Michael DKort, Thomas Drake, Franz Gayl, and Thomas Tamm--Dick

What Do They Do to
Whistleblowers Who Are Already in Prison?
RootsAction Teaminfo@rootsaction.orgvia uark.edu

Kevin "Rashid"
Johnsonhas
been blowing the whistle on abuse and torture in U.S. prisons. These actions would
take courage even if Rashid were a guard, but Rashid is a prisoner. He
describes the abuses and names the names:

"As I sit writing this a lieutenant Deward Demoss passes my cell making
segregation rounds. Further down the tier he exchanges words with another
prisoner, then yells down to two unit guards, 'make sure cell 118 doesn’t eat
today.' 'Yessir,' they both chime in. Such is the abusive impunity here in the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice's (TDCJ) Estelle 2 Unit (E2U). In fact,
guards' summarily denying prisoners' meals in this manner is so routine,
there's a nickname for it here. It's called 'jacking trays'. And that's the
least of it."

Rashid is aVirginiaprisoner, transferred first toOregonand now toTexas,
facing new abuses at each stop in apparent retaliation for his writing.

If Rashid's story were found in a nation that ours wanted to bomb, it would
become war propaganda. But Rashid's story is all-American. And it's a similar
story to those of the Angola
3, of Russell Maroon Shoatz, and of the men at Pelican Bay State Prison who
recently sparked a prolonged hunger strike among prisoners throughout California.Prisoners are punished for
exposing crimes and organizing to protest them.

BRIDGING THE GAP (Autumn 2013). Magazine of the Government Accountability
Project, that
protects not only government whistleblowers but corporate and
international.

Opening
article: “GAP Stands with Snowden.” The NSA surveillance whistleblower revealed
constitutional violations and deserves support.
The article is highly worth reading.
The Exec. Dir. Of GAP, Bea
Edwards, also wrote an editorial in defense of Snowden. Other
articles on a USDA inspector whistleblower now facing retaliation, military whistleblowers, petition to ban the
criminalization of whistleblowers, and more.

GAP: NSA people
prior to Snowden who tried to use the system

Dick,
I don’t know if you are the mailing list for the Government Accountability
Project (GAP), but if not you may be interested in this (fund-raising) letter
from them about the history of NSA people prior to Snowden who tried to use the
system and all the grief that caused them. I find the treatment of Drake
particularly reprehensible, but am interested to see that the NSA blithely
ignored a comparatively cheap in-house program and contracted to an outside
vendor a much more expensive and less sophisticated one.

Radomes at
an operating facility of the BND, the main German foreign intelligence
gathering agency, near Bad Aibling,
Germany. The
German government recently confirmed that the BND shares large amounts of data
with the NSA, and according to NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, NSA
operatives work at the Bad Aibling facility. (Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty
Images)

FEATURES » AUGUST 13, 2013

Freedom in the Cloud

Assange, Manning and Snowden are the new heroes of the era of
digitalized control.

[The title in the print edition (Oct. 2013) is: “Superheroes of the Digital Age: Snowden,
Manning and Assange Help Keep the Public Use of Reason Alive.” --Dick]

We need more Mannings and Snowdens—in China, in Russia, everywhere. There are
states much more oppressive than the United States—just imagine what would have
happened to someone like Manning in a Russian or Chinese court (in all
probability there would be no public trial!) However, one should not exaggerate
the softness of the United
States.

We all remember President Obama's smiling face,
full of hope and trust, when he repeatedly delivered the motto of his first
campaign, “Yes, we can!”—we can get rid of the cynicism of the Bush era and
bring justice and welfare to the American people. Now that the United States
continues with covert operations and expands its intelligence network, spying
even on their allies, we can imagine protesters shouting at Obama: “How can you
use drones for killing? How can you spy even our allies?” Obama looks back at
them and murmurs with a mockingly evil smile: “Yes we can…”

However, such simple personalization misses the
point: The threat to our freedom disclosed by whistle-blowers has much deeper
systemic roots. Edward Snowden should be defended not only because his acts
annoyed and embarrassed the U.S.
secret services. Their lesson is global; it reaches far beyond the standard U.S.
bashing. What he revealed is something that not only the United States but also
all the other great (and not so great) powers—from China
to Russia, from Germany to Israel—are doing, to the extent
they are technologically able to do it. His acts thus provide a factual
foundation to our premonitions of how much we are all monitored and controlled.
We didn’t really learn from Snowden (or from Manning) anything we didn’t
already presume to be true—but it is one thing to know it in general, and
another to get concrete data. It is a little bit like knowing that one’s sexual
partner is playing around—one can accept the abstract knowledge of it, but pain
arises when one learns the steamy details, when one gets pictures of what they
were doing.

Back in 1843, the young Karl Marx claimed that
the Germanancien regime“only imagines that it believes in
itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing.” In such a
situation, to put shame on those in
power becomes a weapon—or, as Marx goes on: “The actual pressure must be
made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be
made more shameful by publicizing it.” And this, exactly, is our situation
today: we are facing the shameless cynicism of the representatives of the
existing global order whoonly imagine that they believe in their
ideas of democracy, human rights, etc. What happens in Wikileaks
disclosures is thatthe shame, theirs and ours for tolerating
such power over us, is made more shameful by publicizing it.

What we should be ashamed of is the worldwide
process of the gradual narrowing of the space for what Immanuel Kant called the
“public use of reason.” In his classic textWhat is Enlightenment?, Kant
opposes “public” and “private” use of reason: “private” is for Kant the
communal-institutional order in which we dwell (our state, our nation…), while
“public” is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s Reason:

The public use of one’s reason must always be
free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of
one’s reason, on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without
particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. By public use of one’s
reason I understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the
reading public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a
particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him.

We see where Kant parts with our liberal common
sense: The domain of State is “private,” constrained by particular interests,
while individuals reflecting on general issues use reason in a “public” way.
This Kantian distinction is especially pertinent with the Internet and other
new media torn between their free “public use” and their growing “private”
control. In our era of cloud computing, we no longer need strong individual
computers: Software and information are available on demand, and users can
access web-based tools or applications through browsers as if they were
programs installed on their own computer.

This wonderful new world is, however, only one
side of the story, which reads like the well-known joke about the doctor who
gives “first the good news, then the bad news.” Users are accessing programs
and software files that are kept far away in climate-controlled rooms with
thousands of computers—or, to quote a propaganda-text on cloud computing:
“Details are abstracted from consumers, who no longer have need for expertise
in, or control over, the technology infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ that supports
them.” Two words are tell-tale here:abstractionandcontrol—in order to manage a
cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning,
and this system is by definition hidden from users. The more the small item
(smartphone or tiny portable) I hold in my hand is personalized, easy to use,
“transparent” in its functioning, the more the entire set-up has to rely on the
work being done elsewhere, in a vast circuit of machines which coordinate the
user’s experience. The more our experience is non-alienated, spontaneous and
transparent, the more it is regulated by the invisible network controlled by
state agencies and the large private companies that follow the state's secret
agendas.

Once we chose to follow the path of state
secrets, we sooner or later reach the fateful point at which the very legal
regulations prescribing what is secret become secret. Kant formulated the basic
axiom of the public law: “All actions relating to the right of other men are
unjust if their maxim is not consistent with publicity.” A secret law, a law
unknown to its subjects, legitimizes the arbitrary despotism of those who
exercise it, as indicated in the title of a recent report on China: “Even what’s secret is a secret in China.”
Troublesome intellectuals who reported on China's political oppression,
ecological catastrophes, rural poverty, etc., got years of prison for betraying
state secrets, and the catch is that many of the laws and regulations that made
up the state-secret regime are themselves classified, making it difficult for
individuals to know how and when they’re in violation.

What makes the all-encompassing control of our
lives so dangerous is not that we lose our privacy and all our intimate secrets
are exposed to the view of the Big Brother. There is no state agency that is
able to exert such control—not because they don’t know enough, but because they
know too much. The sheer size of data is too large, and in spite of all
intricate programs for detecting suspicious messages, computers which register
billions of data are too stupid to interpret and evaluate them properly,
yielding ridiculous and unnecessary mistakes whereby innocent bystanders are
listed as potential terrorists—and this makes state control of our
communications even more dangerous. Without knowing why, without doing anything
illegal, we can all of a sudden find ourselves on a list of potential
terrorists. Recall the legendary answer of a Hearst newspaper editor to
Hearst’s inquiry as to why he doesn't want to take a long-deserved holiday: “I
am afraid that if I go, there will be chaos, everything will fall apart—but I
am even more afraid to discover that, if I go, things will just go on as normal
without me, a proof that I am not really needed!” Something similar can be said
about the state control of our communications: We should fear that we have no
secrets, that secret state agencies know everything, but we should fear even more
that they fail in this endeavor.

This is why
whistle-blowers play a crucial role in keeping the “public reason” alive.
Assange, Manning, Snowden… these are our new heroes, exemplary cases of the new ethics that
befits our era of digitalized control. They are no longer just whistle-blowers
who denounce illegal practices of private companies (banks, tobacco and oil
firms) to the public authorities;they denounce these public authorities
themselves when they engage in “private use of reason.”

We need more
Mannings and Snowdens—in China, in Russia,
everywhere. There are states much more oppressive than the United States—just
imagine what would have happened to someone like Manning in a Russian or
Chinese court (in all probability there would be no public trial!) However, one
should not exaggerate the softness of the United States. True, the United States doesn’t treat prisoners as
brutally as China or Russia—because
of their technological priority, they simply do not need the openly brutal
approach (which they are more than ready to apply when it is needed)—the
invisible digital control can do well enough. In this sense, the United States is even more dangerous than China
insofar as their measures of control are not perceived as such, while Chinese
brutality is openly displayed.

It is therefore not enough to play one state
against the other (as Snowden did, when he used Russia
against the United States).
We need a new International—an
international network to organize the protection of whistle-blowers and the dissemination
of their message. Whistle-blowers are our heroes because they prove that if
those in power can do their job of controlling us, we can also fight back and
throw them into a panic.

A version of this story ran in the
October 2013 print issue of In These Times under the headline “Superheroes of
the Digital Age.”

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Slavoj Žižek, a
Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the
Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany.
He has also been a visiting professor at more than 10 universities around the
world. Žižek is the author of many other books, includingLiving in the End Times,First As Tragedy, Then As Farce,The Fragile AbsoluteandDid Somebody Say
Totalitarianism?He lives in London.

My guess is that this is the whole
article. And my second guess is that it is a response to Bill Maher's (stupid)
question to Greenwald Friday evening at the beginning of his show.
Unfortunately, if Maher can read, he doesn't have a great track record of being
able to learn information and admit that he was mistaken... so this won't
likely benefit the HBO host one iota.

Who
can keep up? The revelations -- mainly thanks tothe documentsEdward Snowden took from the
National Security Agency -- are never-ending. Just this week, welearnedthat GCHQ, the British intelligence
agency whose activities are interwoven with the NSA’s, used a program called
Optic Nerve to intercept and store “the webcam images of millions of internet
users not suspected of wrongdoing” (including Americans). As theGuardianreported, "In one six-month
period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery -- including
substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications -- from more than
1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally." Yahoo is now outraged;
the Internet Association, a trade group for the giants of the industry, has
condemned the program; and three U.S. senatorsannouncedan
investigation of possible NSA involvement.

At about the same time, Glenn Greenwaldrevealedthat GCHQ was engaging in
"extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction."
These included "'false flag operations' (posting material to the
internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts
(pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to
destroy), and posting ‘negative information’ on various forums."
Again, this was evidently happening with the knowledge, if not collusion, of
the NSA.

Meanwhile, with Washington entering a self-proclaimed era of "reform" when it
comes to spying on Americans, we just got a striking you-can’t-win-for-losing
Catch-22messagefrom the front lines of the
surveillance wars. Claiming that recent pending lawsuits make it
necessary, the Obama administration has requested permission to hang on to
phone metadata “on billions of U.S. phone calls indefinitely
instead of destroying it after five years.” Hmmm... this may be the
only example we have of the U.S.
intelligence community fighting tooth and nail to stick to the letter of the
law.

And mind you, that’s just dipping a toe in the positively oceanic global
surveillance waters. It’s been nine months since the Snowden revelations
began and who can keep it all straight? Nonetheless, it’s possible to
put everything we know so far into a simple message about our American
world-in-the-making: the surveillance part of the national security state
has, in its own mind, no boundaries at all. As a result, there is no
one, nor any part of communications life on this planet, that is out of
bounds to our surveillers.

Given what we now know, it’s easy to ignore what wedon’t knowabout how
our government is acting in our name. That's why the figure of the
whistleblower -- and the Obama administration’s urge to suppress
whistleblowing of any sort -- remains so important. How are we ever to
know anything about the workings of that secret state of ours if someone
doesn’t tell us? As a result, TomDispatch remains dedicated to
documenting the Obama administration’s ongoing war against those who have the
urge to bring the secret workings of the national security state to our
attention -- especially in cases like Robert MacLean's, where otherwise
little notice is paid in the mainstream media. So today, we’re
publishing a follow-up toour earlier storyabout MacLean, again byTomDispatch regularPeter Van Buren. Himself a
State Department whistleblower, Van Buren takes another deep dive into the
dark territory he has dubbedpost-Constitutional America.Tom

The
Obama administration has just opened a new front in its ongoingwar on whistleblowers.
It’s taking its case against one man, former Transportation Security
Administration (TSA) Air Marshal Robert MacLean, all the way to the Supreme
Court. So hold on, because we’re going back down the rabbit hole with the
Most Transparent Administration ever.

Despiteall the talkby Washington insiders about how
whistleblowers like Edward Snowden should work through the system rather than
bring their concerns directly into the public sphere, MacLean is living proof
of the hell of trying to do so. Through the Supreme Court, the Department of
Justice (DOJ) wants to use MacLean’s case to further limit what kinds of
information can qualify for statutory whistleblowing protections. If the DOJ gets
its way, only information that the government thinks is appropriate -- a
contradiction in terms when it comes to whistleblowing -- could be revealed.
Such a restriction would gut the legal protections of the Whistleblower
Protection Act and have a chilling effect on future acts of conscience.

Having
lost its case against MacLean in the lower courts, the DOJ isseekingto win in front of the Supreme
Court. If heard by the Supremes -- and there’s no guarantee of that -- this
would represent that body’s firstfederalwhistleblower case of the post-9/11
era. And if it were to rule for the government, even more information about
an out-of-control executive branch will disappear under the dark umbrella of
“national security.”